Assassin's (Pathfinder)

[Valdras]

Simple question, the Assassin Prestige Class (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/prestige-classes/core-rulebook/assassin), do you need to be part of an Assassin guild in order to take the class?

As the requirements are Evil, disguise 2, stealth 5, and to have killed someone for no reason other than to be an assassin.

There is nothing to say that has to be given to you by a guild, you just have to do it, so you could just take a job to start as a assassin, and if you were successful, you should be, metawise, able to level in assassin, as you have done the ground work to hone you skills for that right?

I just can't see a concrete answer anywhere.

I can also only find 3 assassin Guilds, the Daggermark Poisoner's Guild, The Red Mantis Group (no relation to Blue Man) and the Norgorber's Fake Priest one.

[Thomar_of_Uointer]

According to the 3.5 DMG, most prestige classes should be tied to an organization, guild, mentor, etc etc. Whether you actually have to do that is up to the GM. The DMG also contains rules for training to level up between adventures, which is very similar. Most prestige class requirements reference an organization explicitly.

GMs should have no problems fitting an group of assassins somewhere into their homebrew settings. If you're running a pre-published setting, you can probably determine what organizations would be likely to have assassins among their ranks and you can nudge the PC in that direction. It's probably best to have the assassins contact the PC first, having noticed their "talents" and they could be "looking for someone whose face won't be recognized."

[Galvin]

Depends on your DM. I for one as a DM think the skills and abilities of the assassin class come from the individuals skill, not from membership in a particular guild. But assassins guilds can be pretty fun. Take the Dark Brotherhood in Elder Scrolls. They have best quest chain in all the games they appear in.

[Psyren]

The idea is for fluff to be mutable. Think about it - the first assassin ever couldn't have been part of a guild, there were no others. You can come up with lots of ways for your character to get his defining "first assignment." It could have been a guild contract as in the 3.5 DMG... or it could be at the behest of a lone mentor, or even a dream/vision sent to him by a god with the portfolio of murder. The first one could even be suffering from a psychosis that makes him completely incapable of empathy or remorse.

For example, in the Game of Thrones universe, the most skilled assassins in the world (the Faceless Men) were founded by a man, some speculate a slave, who lived in ancient Valyria and constantly heard the prayers of his fellow slaves begging for release. Valyria captured slaves from all over the world, thus the slaves in the mines would pray to hundreds or even thousands of different gods, but all those slaves were all praying for the same thing (death); he therefore concluded that they all in fact worshiped the same god, known as the Many-Faced God (since every religion in the GoTU has a god of death.) He therefore became an assassin to grant their wishes, and eventually, gave the gift of death to their masters as well. There was no "guild" to teach him at the time, he simply received/honed his skills on his own.

[Keneth]

For some it's a job, for others a calling.